Monthly Archives: October 2009

If you live in Minnesota, as I do, this story has a depressingly familiar ring: “Democrats Ask New Jersey Secretary of State to Ignore Mismatched Signatures on Absentee Ballot Requests.” The state received about 150,000 absentee ballot applications this year. On about 2,300 of those applications so far, the signature on the request form did not match the signature on the voter’s registration forms with the state. In a development »

Paul wrote a little while ago about the current jobless recovery and mentioned the role of the “stimulus” bill in that phenomenon. In my view, by any objective measure the stimulus package has been a miserable failure. The spending was not targeted in ways that could genuinely have helped the economy (e.g., infrastructure), it has gone disproportionately to supplement the budgets of state and local governments, most of the money »

The Commerce Department reported today that the economy grew by 3.5 percent in the third quarter of this year. This confirms, I think, that the recession is over. It was quite a severe one, but not significantly more so than the one we had in 1982. Employment, as everyone knows, is a lagging indicator, so it’s unlikely we’ll see much improvement on this front for a while. How long that »

Tom Cotton is a Harvard Law School graduate who served as a law clerk to a federal appellate judge and worked at two Washington law firms before joining the Army to become an infantry officer leading troops in combat. Tom was on active duty from 2005 to 2009, serving tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Since he completed his active duty earlier this year I’ve been asking Tom if he »

Senator John Kerry seems to be emerging as President Obama’s go-to person for foreign policy advice on critical issues. This must be rather galling for Vice President Biden and especially Secretary of State Clinton. Biden at least gets to trot out ideas about major matters, such as his “Pakistan First” notion for dealing with the deterioration of our position in Afghanistan. Clinton apparently does not even have that consolation. But »

At a public event recently, California assemblyman Tom Ammiano heckled Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, yelling that Arnold should “kiss my gay ass.” The Assembly has just passed an Ammiano-sponsored bill relating to financing of the Port of San Francisco. Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill with this message; click to enlarge: The Governor’s office says it’s just a “weird coincidence” that the letters that begin each line, read downward from the top, spell…well, »

I missed this story yesterday: UN investigator warns US on use of drones: A U.N. human rights investigator warned the United States Tuesday that its use of unmanned warplanes to carry out targeted executions may violate international law. … [Philip] Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s investigator on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, raised the issue of U.S. Predator drones in a report to the General Assembly’s human rights committee »

A reader pointed out this graphic illustration of the Democrats’ selective view of the origins of the financial crisis; click to enlarge: For a more balanced analysis of the origins of the crisis, check out Peter Schweizer’s Architects of Ruin. »

As John wrote earlier today, Republican Bob McDonnell is cruising to victory in his race against Creigh Deeds for governor of Virginia. The latest Washington Post poll has McDonnell up by 11 percentage points (55-44). Other polls show a lead of around 15 points, which is where the Post had the race in August. The fact that Deeds is polling about the same now as he did in August tends »

Just a few weeks ago, the criminal enterprise called ACORN was on the run. Both House and Senate voted to de-fund the organization, but in different ways that were, in effect, more symbolic than real. The Democrats, having laid low for a while, are now moving to restore ACORN to a more powerful position than ever. Byron York explains last week’s maneuvering in the House Financial Services Committee. Republicans led »

The World Series begins tonight, It pits the team with the best record in baseball this year — the New York Yankees — against the defending champions — the Philadelphia Phillies. These two teams have met only once in the World Series. That happened in 1950, when the “Whiz Kids” from Philadelphia lost to the Yankees in four games, three of which were very low-scoring affairs. Neither the sweep nor »

Scott Rasmussen finds that Republican Bob McDonnell has opened up a thirteen-point lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds in the Virginia Governor’s race. That’s what happens, I guess, when your number one campaign issue is a paper your opponent wrote as a student. But it’s also probably a sign of the conservative resurgence that will have its first opportunity to be felt at the polls on Tuesday. »

Khaled Meshaal is the terrorist murderer who compiled his record in Hamas, which he now heads. Hamas is an organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel through jihad. Article 28 of the Hamas covenant provides that “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. ‘May the cowards never sleep.'” It’s not tough to get a handle on what Hamas is all about. Paul Mirengoff recently drew our attention »

In the course of a relatively brief interview with David Frum over two segments on Monday, our friend Hugh Hewitt demonstrates with clinical precision that Frum is or has become something of a weasel. One reads the transcript of the interview with morbid fascination. Hugh challenges Frum on two columns that are available here and here. Hugh writes: “Frum accused me of narcissism because I treat the references to me »

Mark Moyar is the Kim T. Anderson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the Marine Corps University. He is the author of the revisionist history Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, now available in paperback. The occasion of this post is Professor Moyar’s new book, noted below. But before getting to that, let us pause to note our friend Professor Mackubin Thomas Owens’s assessment of Professor Moyar and Triumph Forsaken »

Last spring, I wrote extensively about Dawn Johnsen, the Obama administration’s stridently leftist nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Justice Department. To my surprise, the Senate has not confirmed Johnsen and does not seem poised to do so. Yet, Johnsen may be involving herself in OLC’s decisions on hiring junior lawyers. That, at least, is what Ed Whelan is hearing from sources he considers reliable. »

CNN, which pioneered cable news, now rates dead last among cable news networks. Prime time ratings are down 68 percent since last year. Of course, much of that is due to 2008 being an election year, but CNN’s fall relative to the other news networks can’t be blamed on the election cycle. Can some of CNN’s decline, at least, be attributed to the network’s liberalism in general and its attacks »